“You don’t say so!” exclaimed Mrs. Cultus. “No medicines? What a blessing! But what takes their place, massage, or change of climate? We’re trying the latter.”
The placid lady, as she soon informed them, was Mrs. Geyser, of Wyoming, claiming to be an expert in the modern field of popular metaphysics. Miss Winchester, who knew what popularity implied, interrupted, “Oh, tell us, Mrs. Geyser, Wyoming is noted, is it not, as a locality where the natural ebullitions produced by physical forces are very remarkable?”
“Assuredly; in the volcanic region of our Park we have many instances of nature’s activity, in the boiling springs and water volcanoes, mud——”
“Baths and smothered combustion?” interrupted Frank Winchester. Mrs. Geyser paid no attention, except to intensify her previous statement.
“I’m quite accustomed to such sights. Nature often looks so quiet and harmless, yet the ebullitions you speak of take effect when not expected.”
“Anybody scalded?” asked Miss Winchester. Mrs. Geyser began to suspect that she was being chaffed.
“Gushers by nature, don’t you think so, Mrs. Geyser?”
Mrs. Geyser could not question this undoubted fact. How could she? Her own ebullitions of thought were already seething. She couldn’t get a word in edgewise without interruptions. How could any one preach practical metaphysics, metaphysics with interruptions? The conditions were most unfavorable. She determined, however, not to be balked in a good cause. No! not by a flippant damsel, anyhow, with her unseemly intrusions. So she fired off one of her big statements to back up what she considered to be practical metaphysics.
“You know, I presume, that we preach the gospel or good news according to doctrine found in the Bible and stated in the tenets of religious Science.”
Mrs. Cultus remarked that she hoped her knowledge of the Bible was sufficient, but, really, she knew little about the tenets. “What are tenets, anyhow?”